The present invention relates to free standing wall/furniture assemblies and more specifically to a kit of pre-manufactured furniture and wall parts that can be assembled to configure a large number of different and versatile furniture and wall configurations.
Hospitals and other health care facilities where patient appointments are conducted or that include patient rooms usually have a preference for built in/wall mounted furniture for several reasons. First, it is generally recognized that built in/wall mounted furniture often requires less space than free standing furniture to facilitate the same functions. For example, built in furniture often enables vertical stacking of storage and work surfaces in ways that are not common with free standing furniture. For instance, with built in furniture, storage cabinets are often hung above and spaced from a work surface on a wall so that at least a portion of the space above the work surface can be used for storage thereby alleviating the need for some other space to be used for the same purpose. Because hospitals are always searching for ways to most effectively use space in patient rooms, exam rooms, consultation rooms, physician offices, etc., built in/wall mounted furniture is a natural choice.
Second, built in/wall mounted furniture can be configured in ways that are generally more sanitary than free standing furniture. In this regard, free standing furniture is often arranged or configured so that tight and difficult to access spaces are formed in which liquids and dirt can accumulate and in which germs can prosper. These tight and difficult to access spaces are typically hard to clean. Hard to clean spaces are not acceptable in medical facilities. In contrast, built in/wall hung furniture can be configured so that hard to clean spaces are essentially nonexistent or at least substantially minimized.
Third, built in/wall mounted furniture can, in at least some cases, be less expensive than free standing furniture, because built in furniture often has less finished surface area than free standing furniture. For example, while a free standing desk will often include four completely finished side surfaces, a built in desk includes at most three finished sides and, in some cases, may only include a front finished side.
While built in/wall mounted furniture systems have several advantages that make them particularly suitable for use in medical facilities, known built in/wall mounted furniture systems also have several short comings. First, built in/wall mounted furniture often has to be custom constructed for specific applications and in most cases has to be installed by highly trained carpenters or the like that are skilled at compensating for peculiar characteristics of specific spaces in which the furniture is to be installed. Skilled installers increases the costs associated with built in/wall mounted furniture systems.
Second, built in/wall mounted systems often require mounting or securing of furniture components to permanent space dividing walls for support. Mounting to permanent walls is labor intensive, requires several skills and defaces the walls. In addition, mounting to permanent walls has been known to damage items behind the walls such as power and data cables and, in the case of a medical facility, gas and liquid piping, which can be expensive to repair.
Third, because built in/wall mounted furniture is often customized for specific spaces, it is hard to remove and reuse this type of furniture in other spaces or applications. For these reasons, in many cases, built in/wall mounted furniture is scrapped after a first use and new furniture is used when a new layout is desired. Scrapping components is costly and wasteful.
One solution that has worked well in the office furniture industry for achieving a look and feel similar to built in/wall mounted furniture has been to use free standing wall/furniture systems instead of the built-ins. For example, wall structures akin to partition wall structures have been designed for use against or immediately adjacent permanent walls. Here, bottom storage assemblies (i.e. cabinets, drawer assemblies, etc.) are placed against front faces of the walls, top work surfaces are added to the bottom storage assemblies and top storage assemblies are mounted to top portions of the front faces of the walls. These freestanding wall/furniture systems typically include highly engineered connecting solutions so that system assembly, disassembly and reconfiguration are very easy. In addition, as the label implies, these “freestanding” systems do not require connection to permanent wall structure and therefore do not deface permanent walls or cause any damage to components (i.e., cables, pipes, etc.) there behind.
While freestanding wall/furniture systems work well in offices, known freestanding wall/furniture systems are not suitable for many medical facility environments for several reasons. First, while the connection mechanisms for these assemblies facilitate quick component connection/disconnection, the connection mechanisms often include spaces, slots, openings and other small recesses that are difficult to keep clean and where germs and liquids can accumulate and therefore these systems are relatively unsanitary.
Second, because the connection mechanisms and the components that they connect to are highly engineered for their specific purposes, these components and mechanisms are relatively expensive and therefore increase overall system costs appreciably which renders these systems too expensive for many applications.
Third, while cabinets, drawer assemblies, shelving units, etc., have been modularized, other furniture components used with free standing furniture systems are far more difficult to modularize. For instance, work surfaces have been difficult to modularize. To this end, work surface users typically like a completely flat and single plane surface with very tight seams. Despite highly accurate manufacturing processes that can be used to manufacture storage units that have essentially identical dimensions, when those units are places one next to the other in a patient room or the like, nuances in the supporting floor often result in misaligned or at least extremely difficult to align top surfaces. For this reason it has been standard practice to provide single piece work surface forming top members that span over multiple modular storage units or to provide top surface members that can be pieced together on sight using mechanical fasteners to provide the work surfaces. Where single piece top members have been used, design is constrained by the number of different types of top surfaces supplied (e.g., while several top surfaces may be provided for two or three storage unit configurations, in most cases no single top surface will be provided for ten unit configurations). Where multiple top members are fastened together on sight, assembly costs increase appreciably.
One additional problem with wall surfaces in medical facilities is that the wall structures often are defaced when various devices including dispensers, device and medical item holders, containers, etc., are mounted thereto and then removed so that other dispensers, holders and containers can be mounted in their stead. In the medical industry, replacement of dispensers and other devices and containers is routine as new products come to market and facilities change suppliers routinely. Often new mounting holes have to be drilled in the walls when new dispensers, holders and containers are mounted. Over time the walls where items are mounted begin to look shabby as holes from previously mounted dispensers, devices and containers are exposed.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a furniture system that can provide the look and feel of built in/wall mounted furniture that is versatile, relatively sanitary, relatively inexpensive and easy to install. In addition, it would be advantageous to have a system that has the aforementioned characteristics where the system components can be relatively easily decoupled and reconfigured. Moreover it would be advantageous to have a mounting structure for dispensers and other items that can be replaced periodically so that old and unused mounting holes are not visible thereon.